Fright Fest

Six Flags Marine World, Vallejo

Reviewed by: Hauntmistress
10/20/2001

Having grown up in the Bay Area, I remember visiting Marine
World when it was called Marine World Africa USA, and was
located in Redwood City. There were animal attractions, a
playground for kids, and a water slide. The park moved to
its current location in Vallejo and added rides and other
attractions after being acquired by Six Flags, Inc., the world's
largest regional theme park company, which through a subsidiary,
Park Management Corp., manages and operates Six Flags Marine
World.

A tradition of the new park is Fright Fest every
October. The park stays open later than its normal
operating hours and in addition to the rides, features four huge
haunted houses and other attractions aimed at frightening the
daylights out of you -- or at least keeping you
entertained.

The park is very dark and spooky at night. There are
well-costumed characters lurking throughout the park and they
have an uncanny ability to sneak up on you and walk right next
to you until you casually glance up to see that it's not your
friend beside you, but a mass murderer with a chainsaw glaring
at you.

When you first enter the park, you have no doubt that it's
Halloween - Michael Jackson's "Thriller" is blaring
and every half-hour a reproduction of the "Thriller"
video occurs, complete with corpses, smoke, and lights.

Amid the roller coasters and spooky attractions, the haunted
houses steal the show. Brutal Planet, Nightmare, Carnival
of Doom, and Black-Water Bayou all offer a party for your
senses. The costumes and make-up of the characters in the
haunted houses are very well done. The houses themselves
offer room after room of scary props. The houses are very
dark and every now and again leave you with a sense of vertigo
with flying props and spinning rooms.

Even though the park is moving massive amounts of people
through its haunted houses, they make sure to leave plenty of
room between your party and the next party, so you're not
walking through the whole attraction with little screaming
Johnny who was in line behind you.

For children, the park features a trick-or-treat trail, daily
costume contests, and a hay maze in the Loony Tunes Spooky Town.

My only complaint about Fright Fest are the lines. Give
yourself plenty of time to thoroughly enjoy the
attractions. You have to wait in line to buy tickets to
get into the park (unless you buy advanced tickets), and then
wait in lines again for every haunted house you enter. And
by lines, I mean LINES. The average wait time for entering
a haunted house is over an hour. Leave yourself at least
four hours just to enjoy the haunted houses. Although the
later it gets, the more the lines decrease. You also want
to leave yourself enough time to go on the thrill rides, such as
Vertical Velocity and Boomerang.

Fright Fest is costly, but more worth the money than most
haunted attractions. Not only do you get to enter four
spooky haunted houses, you get to see various scary attractions occurring
all through the park and ride the rides. You will need to
pay for parking, park admittance, and a ticket to the haunted
houses.

A word of caution: be prepared to walk. Not just all
over the spacious park, but from your car to the park and
back. The parking lot is a good walk away from the park
itself, and although there is a shuttle, the line for it is so
long it's faster to walk.

General admission is $42.99;
$21.50 for children 48 inches and under; free for children
under 3; $32.99 for the disabled and seniors over 60. There
is a $10 additional charge for the haunted houses each day.
Recipients get a coupon book that includes a ticket good for
a return admission. Parking is $10.